Corps Values

“Not a simple man!” said a Japanese official of Douglas MacArthur in 1950. Like haiku poetry, the statement conveys a lot in very few words. It captures the frustrating and mercurial essence of the man. Not lovable but indeed fascinating and always elusive, MacArthur displayed exceptional ability in the fields of generalship and administration, in addition to the coarser arts of wire pulling and propaganda. In all of these, he was a supreme virtuoso. He led one of the most adventurous and dramatic lives in American history, which made him a gift to biographers and a subject of enduring interest to people.

The milestones of his career are well-known. He graduated first in his class at West Point in 1903. After earning a chestful of medals for bravery in World War I France, his meteoric career included a stint as superintendent at West Point in the 1920s and service as the Army’s chief-of-staff in the 1930s. He retired in 1937 but was recalled to active duty in mid-1941. In 1942 he assumed command of the Allied forces battling Japan in the Southwest Pacific. In 1945, he received Japan’s surrender in a dramatic ceremony aboard the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay. He subsequently served as supreme commander of the forces occupying Japan, a post he used to institute enduring reforms. Given command of United Nations forces at the outbreak of the Korean War, he landed troops at Inchon in a daring amphibious assault that led to a routing of the invading enemy. By marching north through the partitioned country, however, he drew Communist China into the conflict. In the wake of bitter disagreements with his superiors about American strategy, he was recalled, his celebrated career abruptly ended.

Americans either adore MacArthur or despise him; they are rarely neutral on the subject. Some laud him as a great soldier and patriot. Others excoriate him as a military blunderer and pompous charlatan. Certainly no other American commander has been more controversial or flamboyant. The catalog of myths about him is endless. Whether revered or reviled, General Douglas MacArthur—brilliant and controversial throughout his fifty-three year military career—remains a landmark figure in twentieth-century American history and an endlessly fascinating subject of study more than thirty years after his death.

What explains this enduring fascination with MacArthur? Part of the answer lies in his theatrical flair, another part in his spectacular rise and tragic fall, still another in the striking contradictions that lay at the heart of his character. Especially the latter. He was a proponent of the warrior’s “manly” virtues whose ambitions were fired by a woman—his mercilessly ambitious mother. He was a soldier of seemingly effortless success who viewed the path to the top of his profession as an ordeal. Behind his bravura and stern front he was restive and high-strung, an embodiment of machismo who frequently wept. He appeared to need enemies the way other people need friends, but his craving for adulation was immense, too. He was a general whose greatest achievement came as a statesman guiding Japan’s reconstruction after World War II. He was a military officer who swore an oath of allegiance to the Constitution and flagrantly violated it through insubordination to the commander-in-chief during the Korean War. An Army man through-and-through, he chose the Navy town of Norfolk, Virginia, as his final resting place. The list could go on and on, but the point would remain the same: Douglas MacArthur was a thundering paradox.

Many talented historians have wrestled with the immense contradictions in MacArthur’s character, peeling back layer after layer to seek out the quintessence of the man. Professor D. Clayton James spent nearly two decades tracking the general in his The Years of MacArthur (3 vols, 1970–1985). Scholarly, perceptive, balanced, and, in its accounts of battles, extraordinarily detailed, it remains the definitive work. No one attempting an inquiry into MacArthur’s life could...